Tiffany Studios

Private Collection, Chicago

Thence by descent to the present owner

William Feldstein, Jr. and Alastair Duncan, The Lamps of Tiffany Studios, New York, 1983, p. 49 (for the shade)

Martin Eidelberg, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Nancy A. McClelland and Lars Rachen, The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York, 2005, p. 149 (for the shade)

Margaret K. Hofer and Rebecca Klassen, The Lamps of Tiffany Studios: Nature Illuminated, New York, 2016, pp. 70 and 72 (for the shade)

Alastair Duncan, Tiffany Lamps and Metalware, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2019, pp. 105, no. 410, 133, no. 540 and 188, no. 747 (for the shade); 95, no. 364-365 and 221, no. 867 (for the base)

One of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s finest paintings, The Blossoms of Spring, currently in the permanent collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art (Winter Park, Florida) includes a “foreground filled with the brightness of tulips and other spring flowers in a rush of tender early bloom.” A visitor to his Laurelton Hall estate on the eve of a May 1914 grand fête drove on a roadway “bordered with masses of white flowers and once within the gates the gardens burst into view with their wealth of tulips, pansies, wisterias and other early flowers.” Obviously one of Tiffany’s favorite flowers and a symbolic harbinger of spring, the tulip was a natural choice to be featured in a leaded glass shade.

The first recorded Tulip shade, with somewhat stylized downward-hanging blossoms and no leaves, was introduced at the 1902 Turin Exposition. The design gradually evolved and, by about 1910, Tiffany Studios was creating shades that far more accurately depicted how the flower appeared in its natural setting. Perhaps the company’s finest representation was its ambitious 22-inch diameter shade (model number 1548), that first appeared in their 1913 Price List. The lamp offered here displays the finest attributes of this highly desirable model.

A multitude of overlapping tulips are depicted in wide range of poses and colors, including orange-red streaked peach, white-streaked lemon and yellow with green highlights. The blossoms are at the terminus of swaying, green-mottled yellow stems among angular green foliage. All of this is on a lovely background, the lower third in ambers and greens representing the flower bed and the upper portion a beautiful sky blue. The shade is supported by a superb patinated bronze telescoping “openwork” base (model number 397).

– PAUL DOROS